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Procurement Tools

Are you still managing your RFPs through email? Do you know where your contracts are and when they expire? WhyAbe.com offers completely free procurement tools including: RFX management, Reverse Auctions and Contract Management to help you automate your sourcing initiatives. -- Visit WhyAbe

Procurement News

Source One, an industry leading procurement service provider, and ThomasNet, the leading industrial supplier directory, have teamed up to offer free procurement tools to the marketplace. -- Purchasing Tools

Spend Management

Source One offers Spend Management Services to assis in managing operational spend in order to most effectively build and deliver your products or services while improving your profitability.-- Spend Management

How to qualify to become a supply chain management executive? The Wall Street Journal’s CareerJournal gives some tips; Michael Higgs of purchasing.com offers some perspective; and researchers offer some data.

Mark Zafra, a Director of Supply Chain Management for Agilent Technologies profiled in CareerJournal’s “How I Got There” series, advices would-be supply chain professionals to prepare for success by picking up solid negotiation, logistics, financial analysis, and people skills; practical experience working with shipping and receiving employees and with all levels of an organization; and a BA in business or an MBA.

But Higgs, having been asked to define the skill set an employer might look for in a global sourcing specialist, offers a sensible approach that would work for pretty much any employer.

“You have to ask yourself what skill set(s) you value the most,” Higgs writes, “and then ask, are the rest of the skill sets trainable? There are only two skills that I see that are really hard to train, so the candidate should possess them upon hire: leadership…and tenacity…. People with these two skills and with the right mentorship have a really high probability to grow into a really valuable employee.”

So what does the research show? Last year, academics from City University and Cass Business School in London and the Anderson School of Management of the University of California, Los Angeles, published “What Employers Demand from Applicants for MBA-Level Supply-Chain Jobs.” The study analyzed 704 online advertisements for supply chain management jobs for MBA graduates. The analysis indicated that employers require these general skills (in decreasing order):

communication

leadership

project management

team

general analytical

and knowledge in these supply chain topics (also in decreasing order):

sourcing and supplier management

inventory and forecasting

information and electronic mediated environments

marketing and channel retructuring

transportation and logistics

metrics and performance

service and after sales support

And how are well are MBA programs succeeding in supplying the education that businesses are demanding? Check out the study.